530 Wedding No First Look

It depends on what you have planned during that time and what you want for photos. Doing a first look saves a little time with couple's portraits - but you are talking like 30 minutes. What time are you planning on dinner? If you did a short ceremony at 5:30pm followed by photos, you could start dinner by 7pm and still have 3 hours for meal, speeches, and dancing.

No cocktail hour would be hard, because you would want to do the formal portraits in the middle of the reception. Depending on where you are, it could be dark out and you could have lighting issues. Or you can have a break between the ceremony and reception, but with no cocktail food, that's very boring for the guests.

I'm not sure how you would do this without having a cocktail hour. What would your guests be doing while you and your fiance are taking photos after the ceremony?

Sorry for the novel, bu my time frame is the exact same so I just wanted to share our plan. We are able to get into the venue at 11am morning of. We aren't doing a rehearsal dinner the night before, just a quick run through in the morning. We are going to get a bunch of our separate photos done before the wedding. Me with the bridal party and families as well as him with the bridal party and families. I didn't want a first look because capturing the moment of his reaction when I walk down the aisle is so special to me. Our ceremony is going to be short, approximately 30 minutes so at 6 the bar will open for our guests while we do photos. We are going to do a big group photo with both families, then us with immediate families and the full bridal party. We are getting those out of the way so that our parents and the bridal can go mingle with and entertain the guest. Then we'll do most of our couple photos (we're going to pop back out later for sunset photos). I hope this was at least a little bit helpful. I think the best time saver will be getting as many photos beforehand (I think we're starting pictures around 3).

If you aren't going to have a first look and you aren't going to have cocktail hour, I can't see a feasible way you and your fiancee will be able to get all the pictures you need taken. I feel like the only way you'll be able to do this is if you cut into reception time, which I am highly against because that means your asking family members and your bridal party members to get out of the dance floor and do something they don't want to do. When it comes to making you wedding timeline, you also have to make room for photos because sometimes it can take a long time to get all the photos you need. I would say that you need to at least reserve 1-2 hours to get all the photos you need taken, taken.